Last weekend my wife and i paid a long overdue visit to our favourite computer bookstore: Lehmanns Fachbuchhandlung in Hamburg. The staff, especially Mr. Kaeder is very knowledgeable and they have a quite good selection of “real” CS books, not only this ” Teach yourself …” and “… for dummies” crap.

Furthermore members of the GI – the german society of computer science professionals (something comparable to the ACM) get a 10% discount on imported english books. For the non germans over here: This is something special because of a german law called Buchpreisbindungsgesetz, a law that obligates publisher to fix a price and forbids that any bookseller to sell the book for a different price. (some other european countries like Austria and France have this too).

As usual we left with quite a number of books we found interesting:

• Ajax in Practice
• Joel on Software
• Agile Project Management with Scrum
• Grid Computing. Konzepte
• Fast SOA
• SOA-Expertenwissen
• The Geospatial Web
• Adaptive Business Intelligence
• Advanced ActionScript 3 with Design Patterns
• Groovy in Action
• Web Component Development with Zope 3
• The Essential Guide to Flex 2 with ActionScript 3.0
• xUnit Test Patterns: Refactoring Test Code

Quite a bit of reading. Will keep us occupied for some time. Especially when interleaving with other non-CS reads. Any opinion on these books? Which one to start with?